Hey all,
Beem here! I'm quite excited to share my experiences, but it would be good to hear about my background first. I am a Computer Science BSc (Hons) graduate. I've been in financial services since the start of my career, ranging from trading platforms to payment systems (including payment integrations, etc.). During my career, I've come to realize that programming is truly my passion, both inside and outside of work. It's a lucky position to be in when your passion is your job. During my journey into development, I delved deep into learning new languages and discovering what some languages do better than others. I don't consider myself a programming polyglot, but it is a huge passion of mine to create practical things from it.
During the course of learning new languages, I came across Rustlang. It is a great language to learn about. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading the official Rustlang book, which has been contributed to by highly talented developers and technical writers alike. Moving on to the journey into DeFi, being in a highly regulated space, cryptocurrency never really crossed my mind. Of all the things I cared about, it was always the technology that interested me the most. If it's something I find interesting to explore, I look into it more deeply. You can probably guess where this is going.
If you don't know me, I've been deep diving into Scrypto since version 0.1.0. Firstly, I just wanted to dabble and learn a new programming paradigm, but I soon realized how fascinated I was with how DeFi works. It also reminded me how premature, illegitimate, and disorganized the industry really is compared to my day job. However, this represented a huge opportunity as an early adopter developer. So why Scrypto? There is Solidity, after all. If I wanted to earn a huge amount, that's where the liquidity is. As a software developer in finance, creating software that's thoroughly tested, safe, and reduces developer overhead is highly important when working with regulatory requirements. Scrypto was the only paradigm of smart contracts that came close to truly feeling that. During the course of learning Scrypto, here are some top tips I hope you can take:
Bleeding edge means more effort in learning
Docs are sparse and far between, try digging into the actual codebase of Scrypto
Make your life easier and think pragmatically instead of over abstracting your solution. Fast paced changes will make you shoot yourselves in the foot when bleeding edge breaking changes decides to make you go through monumental effort to refactor your code
Go wrong. Seriously, go wrong as many times as you can until you get it right. People can easily help you out but if you figure out a solution, you’re more likely to remember
Feedback to the core team. Its important to put your thoughts on possible improvements
Hang out in the Discord! With a small community of developers, it means better accessibility and less noise to help you out in your journey.
And with that, I leave you with the awesome projects I am part of. Namely, RadLock and XRD Domains. My goal being in DeFi is to truly legitimize in a trustless fashion what it means to be public and transparent about your assets. Locking/Vesting/Domains is a step I feel we need towards a better DeFi.
If you have any questions, you can contact me on X, my handle is @beemdvp 🙂
